You could look at the past week & reasonably think MAGA/Q folk MUST know it's over.

But the thing about conspiracy theories is that they never end: they morph into new theories while maintaining that they've ALWAYS been right.

For MAGA/Q, it's "the plan" - Let me explain.

Right now the narrative running through the darker parts of the Internet involves "The Storm."

The Storm is a conspiracy theory that ALL of this - the election loss, the rhetoric, the insurrection, the 2nd impeachment - are part of Trump's master plan to root out the Deep State.

You see, in Trump's infinite wisdom he realized he could never MAGA as long as there were traitors in his own party.

So he came up with The Storm as a way to know who was truly a believer in MAGA, and who was a RINO.

This has all been an elaborate trap to catch those traitors.

The Storm starts w/Trump discovering, many months ago, that the voting machines had been hacked by Bill Gates' associates.

Trump ALLOWED the votes to be flipped, but they have PROOF that Trump won 410 electoral votes.

Of course, he let them THINK they had won.

By APPEARING weak & disjointed, he encouraged the Dems to lash out and the RINOs to jump ship.

Even the departures from his admin were carefully planned to give the appearance of disorder so that ALL the traitors would think it was time to show their true colors and strike.

Early on I, like most of the tech press, framed privacy concerns of the Internet economy as "trading advertising for services."

I was slow to realize that our private info wasn't being used for advertising

... but as a way to SHAPE how we see the

- THEY had internet services that could entertain, connect, & enable ME.

- I had personal information THEY could sell to companies wanting to target goods & services to a receptive audience.

Not only was it a consensual transaction, but it SEEMED as if we got the better deal.

After all, what were we REALLY trading?

Browsing patterns? Location data? Emails?

For most it was data that not only did we not care about, but we didn't know that data was being created in the first place.

That assumption was true... at first.

Then enter "Big Data."

Over a decade ago, the idea of creating actionable intelligence from the disparate data pools collected from all that "useless information" moved from the rarified air of academic research into the enterprise

At first, we rolled our own big data analytics using tools like Hadoop. Then vendors developed their own BDA into CRM.

Soon, companies like Salesforce, Amazon & Microsoft transformed ALL markets w/one promise:

"The data shows us what your customers WANT"